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Twenty years of the MEROPS database of proteolytic enzymes, their substrates and inhibitors.

Nucleic acids research | 2016

The MEROPS database (http://merops.sanger.ac.uk) is an integrated source of information about peptidases, their substrates and inhibitors, which are of great relevance to biology, medicine and biotechnology. The hierarchical classification of the database is as follows: homologous sets of sequences are grouped into a protein species; protein species are grouped into a family; families are grouped into clans. There is a type example for each protein species (known as a 'holotype'), family and clan, and each protein species, family and clan has its own unique identifier. Pages to show the involvement of peptidases and peptidase inhibitors in biological pathways have been created. Each page shows the peptidases and peptidase inhibitors involved in the pathway, along with the known substrate cleavages and peptidase-inhibitor interactions, and a link to the KEGG database of biological pathways. Links have also been established with the IUPHAR Guide to Pharmacology. A new service has been set up to allow the submission of identified substrate cleavages so that conservation of the cleavage site can be assessed. This should help establish whether or not a cleavage site is physiologically relevant on the basis that such a cleavage site is likely to be conserved.

Pubmed ID: 26527717 RIS Download

Research resources used in this publication

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Additional research tools detected in this publication

Antibodies used in this publication

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Associated grants

  • Agency: Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom
    Id: WT077044/Z/05/Z

Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.

This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


MEROPS (tool)

RRID:SCR_007777

An information resource for peptidases (also termed proteases, proteinases and proteolytic enzymes) and the proteins that inhibit them. The MEROPS database uses an hierarchical, structure-based classification of the peptidases. In this, each peptidase is assigned to a Family on the basis of statistically significant similarities in amino acid sequence, and families that are thought to be homologous are grouped together in a Clan. There is a Summary page for each family and clan, and these have indexes. Each of the Summary pages offers links to supplementary pages. About 3000 individual peptidases and inhibitors are included in the database, and there is a Summary page describing each one. You can navigate to this by any of several routes. There are indexes of Name, MEROPS Identifier and source Organism on the menu bar. Each Summary page describes the classification and nomenclature of the peptidase or inhibitor, and provides links to supplementary pages showing sequence identifiers, the structure if known, literature references and more.

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Pfam (tool)

RRID:SCR_004726

A database of protein families, each represented by multiple sequence alignments and hidden Markov models (HMMs). Users can analyze protein sequences for Pfam matches, view Pfam family annotation and alignments, see groups of related families, look at the domain organization of a protein sequence, find the domains on a PDB structure, and query Pfam by keywords. There are two components to Pfam: Pfam-A and Pfam-B. Pfam-A entries are high quality, manually curated families that may automatically generate a supplement using the ADDA database. These automatically generated entries are called Pfam-B. Although of lower quality, Pfam-B families can be useful for identifying functionally conserved regions when no Pfam-A entries are found. Pfam also generates higher-level groupings of related families, known as clans (collections of Pfam-A entries which are related by similarity of sequence, structure or profile-HMM).

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FASTA (tool)

RRID:SCR_011819

Software package for DNA and protein sequence alignment to find regions of local or global similarity between Protein or DNA sequences, either by searching Protein or DNA databases, or by identifying local duplications within a sequence.

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